[In the following review, Morrison assesses Shop Talk as an insightful, interesting collection that reveals much about the ten authors that Roth “interviews” in the book.]

Writers, Philip Roth claims, “divide like the rest of mankind into two categories: those who listen to you and those who don't”. His own fiction is famous for its manic talkers; large chunks of his recent novels take the form of monologues and draw us in so deeply that we forget the speech marks. A fiction like this, with protagonists who are desperate to unburden themselves, seems to be interested only in getting heard. Yet its author must have listened, if only to the voices inside him. Roth is thought of as an egomaniacal writer because of all those alter egos—there have now been eight Nathan Zuckerman books, three David Kepesh books, four “Philip Roth” books, and ten more of no fixed category. But he also has a talent for backing off, lending an ear, sitting quietly (well, almost) and taking notes.

Shop Talk consists of ten short pieces about fellow writers and artists, first published in places such as the New Yorker or New York Review of Books. The pieces are a mixture of interview and profile. You could call them journalism, but few contemporary journalists are well-prepared enough to have finished (or even begun) the books written by the author they have come to interview. Roth does not rely on cuttings. He has read his subjects' oeuvre and thought about it deeply. How could he not? They are colleagues and, by and large, close friends.

Six of the pieces are offered as “conversations”. Typically, they begin by giving a strong sense of place (visiting Primo Levi in Turin, Roth goes to the paint factory where he worked until retirement, then to the apartment building where he was born and spent most of his life); go on to describe the author's appearance (Levi seems to Roth “some quicksilver little woodland creature”, whereas Ivan Klíma, with his haircut and carnivore teeth, is a “highly intellectually evolved Ringo Starr”); attempt to set the work in its intellectual context; then slip into question-and-answer mode. The questions are rarely short, and the answers are not strict transcriptions but versions “distilled” from hours and sometimes days of dialogue.

Unlike an interviewer for the Paris Review, Roth is neither impersonal nor neutral. His subjects' obsessions are his own obsessions; Jewishness, gender, sex, the family, work, the Holocaust, Israel, Kafka, the competing claims of fiction and autobiography. A certain matiness is inevitable: mutual affirmation (“You are in the business, so you know how these things happen”) and even mutual congratulation. “Exactly—you hit the bull's eye”, Primo Levi says, after Roth has speculated that a Crusoe-like “practical, humane scientific mind” helped him live through Auschwitz, though Levi at once qualifies this (“I have seen the survival of shrewd people and silly people, the brave and the cowardly, ‘thinkers’ and madmen”). The questions are serious, respectful and intelligent, and the interviewees respond in kind.

This isn't to say that Roth is fawning or that tensions don't emerge. Levi rebuts his accusation that If Not Now, When? is “narrowly tendentious”. Aharon Appelfeld defends the “unrewarding inscrutability” of Badenheim 1939 and his right to invent (“The reality of the Holocaust surpassed any imagination. If I remained true to the facts, no one would believe me”). Milan Kundera quibbles with Roth's use of the word “allegory” about a section of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Some of the authors holding forth in Shop Talk are less famous than their interlocutor, and most are more plain-speaking. Only Kundera matches Roth's tangled introspection.

The eight men he converses with, who also include Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow, are all Jewish; the two women in the book are Catholic. The Mary McCarthy piece sits oddly here, since its subject is Roth's novel The Counterlife, which, so she wrote to tell him, “irritated and offended her” as a Christian: her two-page letter is republished here, along with his self-exonerating four-page reply (“you fail to see how serious this circumcision business is to Jews”). Roth's conversation with Edna O'Brien is more in keeping with the rest, though his description of her has a physical glow not apparent elsewhere: “you cannot miss the white skin, the green eyes, the auburn hair. The coloring is dramatically Irish—as is the mellifluous fluency.”

The book's most intimate essays come towards the end. One is an account of the artist Philip Guston, three of whose drawings of episodes in The Breast are reproduced in the text. The other is a brief memoir of Bernard Malamud, whose fiction the young Roth found marvellously bold and idiosyncratic, but who struck him, when they met, as “a conscientious, courteous working man of the kind whose kibitzing and conversation had been the background music of my childhood, a stubborn, seasoned life insurance salesman …”. Puzzled by Malamud's stiffness and lack of laughter, Roth gently probes the contradictions between the man who suffers and the artist who creates—and also admits the difficulties in their relationship after Malamud took offence at something he had written about The Fixer. They patched things up, but there is a heartfelt, almost brutal scene when the older man, close to death, reads from some new work, hoping to be told that he's on the right track—and Roth, for all his politeness, fails to give him the necessary reassurance.

It is a useful reminder that the conversations writers have with each other in private often end in tears. Those recorded in Shop Talk are to that extent artificial, because conducted with publication in mind: the drink, tantrums, envy and gossip have been edited out. Still, there is enough here, by way of apercus and trade secrets, for that not to matter. And those who have enjoyed Philip Roth's spectacular return to form in his last few novels will be glad to have this to be going on with, until the next.